Common Reading: The FYE Book

The FYE common reading introduces the ideas of the University Theme to students and provides a shared experience. The book is selected through a voting process including the entire University community.

2009-2010: Nickel and Dimed

For 2009–10, the FYE Common Reading is Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America (Henry Holt and Company, Books, 2001).

Book Cover.My first task is to find a place to live. I figure that if I can earn $7 an hour -- which, from the want ads, seems doable -- I can afford to spend $500 on rent or maybe, with severe economies, $600 and still have $400 or $500 left over for food and gas. In the Key West area, this pretty much confines me to flophouses and trailer homes -- like the one, a pleasing fifteen-minute drive from town, that has no air-conditioning, no screens, no fans, no television, and, by way of diversion, only the challenge of evading the landlord's Doberman pinscher. …. (I)t is a shock to realize that "trailer trash" has become, for me, a demographic category to aspire to.

Nickel and Dimed is the story of trying to survive at the lower end of the working class. The working poor are those people who must try to survive while working in entry-level, low-wage jobs. In many cases, their employers count their hours diligently, to make sure the workers do not achieve full time status. This allows the employers to avoid having to allow them to participate in the benefits managers routinely are granted. At the same time, because they work hard, they are also ineligible for Medicaid, and housing subsidies.

Nickel and Dimed gives students a glimpse into the taken-for-granted lives of the working poor in America – those who simply must survive in jobs that pay the minimum wage, or slightly higher. It peers into their lives, and shows the abuses of an economic system in which the profits of capitalism come at the expense of not paying workers sufficient, livable wages. Nickel and Dimed should leave students asking what exactly do we mean when we refer to a minimum wage? What is the minimum level of subsistence that is possible on the minimum level of wages allowed by our government? Nickel and Dimed also asks readers to rethink our stereotypes regarding the invisible people who serve us each and every day.

This book is a natural choice for our 2009-10 University Theme "Dollars and Sense: Personal Finance to World Poverty." Most of our students have already experienced life among the working class, albeit superficially. During their school years and summers breaks, many of our students worked side-by-side with slightly older people for whom the same job literally meant day-by-day survival. Our students differed in that most simply took these jobs in order to earn some additional spending money. At the same time, their parents provided a home, electricity, telephones and internet, water and sewer, food, etc.. The working poor on the other hand are required to live on these low-wage jobs. They are not in the same boat as our students. Their boat is sinking.

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